Jinnah The Secular Visionary

Manto and other Jinnah lovers love quoting Jinnah ad nauseum in their quest to prove that Jinnah was a secular visionary. Jinnah undoubtedly was a great linguist and said many wonderful things - about secularism , about democracy , about equality and what not.

But fact remains that these are lip services and the evidence of Jinnah’s intellectual dishonesty. If shutting up the women within the four walls of the house is a crime. Jinnah is the accomplice of that crime. If Jinnah really wanted to make Pakistan a modern state with sovereignty resting on people he should not have created a country under the Islamic pretext. Jinnah should have known Islam is not for equality of women or democracy when he gave birth to a nation with that identity as its raison d’être.

You can’t create an Islamic country that is not Islamic. This is cognitive dissonance. There is an inconsistency between the above aspiration and the Islamic identity that he imposed on Pakistan.


Jinnah was a secularist in his mind but he was an opportunist man who dreamed to be remembered as the father of a new nation. However like all good Muslim politicians he used religion as a tool for his political ambitions. Islam was created as a tool of domination and allows itself to be uses as such by any unscrupulous power hungry corrupt man.

Jinnah came across as a fraud, as a haughty ambitious man who brought about the death of millions just to make a name for himself.

Why Muslims had to separate? Wasn’t it because of their Islamic identity? Isn’t it because they believed to be the "pure" ones and the Hindus, the "dirty" ones?

Jinnah offered Muslims "self-government". Why Muslims should have a different selfhood to begin with? The problem with Islamic world is this very Islamic identity. Muslims cannot integrate with others and cannot co-exist with anyone else. They always see themselves as different. It is always "us" the Muslims vs. "them" the Kafirs. The power hungry Muslim politicians know that and they take advantage of this weakness for their own gain. Hatred is always a unifying force. So they incite the hatred of the non-Muslims and rally the benighted Muslims like flies around rotten meat..

Doesn’t the very fact that a man who claimed to be a secularist said Muslims can’t live with Hindus prove that he was a hypocrite? If he was truly a secularist would he have played the religious card?